Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #134 fea­tures an inter­view with Toronto, Ontario fine art pho­tog­ra­pher Bret Culp. Dur­ing the inter­view we talk about find­ing and devel­op­ing your own pho­tog­ra­phy or shoot­ing style. Bret offers up some prac­ti­cal tips on how to make this process easier.

Feel free to add to the con­ver­sa­tion by leav­ing a com­ment or sharing/liking this post in some way.

Thanks to The Cam­era Store (The largest cam­era store in Cal­gary, Alberta, Canada) for spon­sor­ing the Photography.ca podcast.

Click the player at the end of this post to lis­ten to (or down­load) the 30ish minute podcast.

Mono­lith, The face of Half Dome (1927) by Ansel Adams

Clear­ing Win­ter Storm (1938) by Ansel Adams

The Dark Hedges, Antrim, North­ern Ire­land, 2011 by Bret Culp

Dun­luce Cas­tle, Antrim, North­ern Ire­land, 2012 by Bret Culp

Bret shares his own Artist State­ment on his Irish port­fo­lio just to give listeners/readers an exam­ple on how devel­op­ing an Artist State­ment can focus you.

Irish Port­fo­lio Artist Statement

“The mythic Irish land­scape and its peo­ple have had a pro­found impact on one another. The Celts saw the land as a liv­ing source of wis­dom, beauty and trans­for­ma­tive spir­i­tual power. Among the first to believe in the eter­nal nature of the human spirit they con­structed mon­u­ments to death, rebirth and the cycles of the sea­sons and stars. Cas­tles, fortresses and ruins are evi­dence of untold inva­sions and con­flicts through­out a tumul­tuous his­tory. These ves­tiges of the past con­tinue to res­onate through the coun­try­side today. Beau­ti­fully poignant in the process of decay they tell their own story and pos­sess their own mor­tal­ity. Noth­ing that belongs to the earth is ever free from it. The sacred con­nec­tion between the land­scape of Ire­land and its peo­ple has not dis­ap­peared over the cen­turies.” —Bret Culp

Although ALL com­ments are appre­ci­ated, com­ment­ing directly in this blog is pre­ferred. Many thanks to Tim Mackle and Ruth M for their com­ments from the last pod­cast. Thanks as well for the emails and wel­come to all the new mem­bers of the photography.ca forum!

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #133 fea­tures an inter­view with Cana­dian fine art pho­tog­ra­pher Royce How­land. Dur­ing the inter­view we dis­cuss what cam­era fea­tures we think are essen­tial. There are loads of extra bells and whis­tles on cam­eras these days and even though both Royce and I have kick-butt cam­era gear, we ignore the major­ity of the new fea­tures and focus on the essen­tials. We also dis­cuss essen­tial cam­era modes and touch on essen­tial lenses.

Of course feel free to let us know if you feel we missed some­thing essential.

Thanks to The Cam­era Store (The largest cam­era store in Cal­gary, Alberta, Canada) for spon­sor­ing the Photography.ca podcast.

Click the player at the end of this post to lis­ten to (or down­load) the 44ish minute podcast.

I Should Be So Indus­tri­ous by Royce Howland

Royce wanted to men­tion some­thing about this image because it relates to a cool fea­ture of some new screens on cameras.

“Some­thing we’re see­ing more com­monly, and the Pen­tax 645Z also has it, is a cam­era LCD that pops out with tilt or tilt-swivel move­ments so you can see it from dif­fer­ent angles. I think this idea is great.….

…This sea holly bloom and bees were about 18 inches off the ground. I wanted a shoot­ing angle of more or less straight across, rather than steeply down­wards or what­ever. That would have been very awk­ward (or even painful!) to shoot through the cam­era viewfinder, hav­ing to con­tort my neck, back, knees, etc. to work through the viewfinder for any length of time. Even using a nor­mal, non-moving LCD would have been a bit of a chal­lenge to see from above. Instead, I was able to put the cam­era on a sta­ble tri­pod, sit on a short 3-legged stool, and pop out the LCD to a com­fort­able angle that I could see just by look­ing down. No neck or back strain even though I pho­tographed from the low shoot­ing angle for about an hour.”

Nick Cave Osheaga 2014 by Marko Kulik — This high ISO image was made using aper­ture pri­or­ity and I moved the focus points over the hand invad­ing Nick’s shirt. Mov­ing those focus points is my favourite essen­tial cam­era feature.

Although ALL com­ments are appre­ci­ated, com­ment­ing directly in this blog is pre­ferred. Many thanks to San­dra Fos­ter for her com­ment from the last pod­cast. Thanks as well for the emails and wel­come to all the new mem­bers of the bul­letin board.

I saw some new pho­tog­ra­phy work by Bryan Adams a short time ago ago where he pho­tographed wounded sol­diers. The images of wounded sol­diers were stark and I wanted to ask Bryan a few ques­tions about the new work. What fol­lows is a quick Q&A about Bryan’s new work called Wounded: The Legacy of War.

Wounded: The Legacy of War — Q&A with Bryan Adams

Ph.ca - I’ve been fol­low­ing your pho­tog­ra­phy for a while and this lat­est work is the ‘rawest’ work of yours I’ve seen thus far. Can I ask what drew you to this sub­ject matter?

ba: I felt com­pelled to do some­thing for these guys as I was never happy that we went to war in the Mid­dle East. I was for­tu­nate to have meet a jour­nal­ist called Car­o­line Frog­gatt who wanted to do some­thing and she was acquainted with some of the sol­diers already, so the project started from that.

Ph.ca - Why pho­to­graph wounded soldiers?

ba: I want to cre­ate pho­tos of the time and doc­u­ment as many peo­ple as I could that had incurred these severe war injuries in order to raise aware­ness to their plight and also show peo­ple a side of the hor­ror of war that is often con­cealed from every­day media. The long term idea was that per­haps it could maybe be an exhi­bi­tion or maybe even a book down the road. All of that hap­pened thank­fully in part to my pub­lisher Steidl who saw the beauty in the pho­tos and agreed to make the “Wounded — The Legacy of War” book with me. It’s now its tour­ing the world as an exhibition.

ba: For an hour at the most, then we would sit and have a chat and film that, I’ve not even looked at the inter­view footage, it’s just archived. Some­times these guys would stay over at my house as they had come great dis­tances from the North of Eng­land and even Scot­land to be involved and it was too much to travel there and back in a day.

Ph.ca - How long did this project take from start to fin­ish and where were the pho­tographs taken?

ba: sched­ules were always being sorted out, I sup­pose the whole thing took nearly 5 years, it was very on and off. Ini­tially it wasn’t easy to find sub­jects that would agree to being pho­tographed, but once a few sub­jects had agreed and par­tic­i­pated, rec­om­mend­ing their friends became nor­mal and the word got out.

Ph.ca - All of the pho­tographs that I’ve seen from this series high­light the vet­er­ans’ wounds, ver­sus play­ing them down through pos­ing tech­niques as other pho­tog­ra­phers have often done. Was the pos­ing of the sub­jects a col­lab­o­ra­tive process or solely under your direction?

ba: it was all ulti­mately under my direc­tion, how­ever they were wel­come to show as much as they liked and I always hoped they would show as much as possible.

I would show them what I had done with other sol­diers, and usu­ally once they saw what was going on, the shirts would come off and the wounds became very apparent.

Ph.ca - Did some vet­er­ans have trou­ble expos­ing their wounds so boldly?

ba: Only one as I can remem­ber who didn’t want to take off his pros­thetic limb. I never asked why.

Ph.ca - Was it an emotional/cathartic process for some veterans?

ba: I think they were curi­ous that some­one like me was doing some­thing like this, but I’ve had a lot of pos­i­tive con­ver­sa­tions with them since and the reac­tions have been incred­i­ble. Too many to men­tion here.

Mostly to do with see­ing them­selves as a vehi­cle to help other peo­ple, the unselfish­ness was hum­bling, let me tell you.

Ph.ca - Our read­ers will want to know - Can you describe the cam­era gear and the light­ing gear you used to cre­ate these photographs?

ba: It’s all shot in my day­light stu­dio using nat­ural light which I would drape off to cre­ate the amount of light for each guy. Occa­sion­ally if the stu­dio got too dark in the late after­noon, I would bounce a light into the wall to give me a stop or two and mix it with the day­light. There was never a direct source of light it was always dif­fused. I used a Mamiya RZ cam­era with a Phase One back.

Ph.ca - Given that the legacy of war will con­tinue, and there will be no short­age of future wounded vet­er­ans, will you be adding to this body of work, or is this a closed project?

ba: it’s closed for now, espe­cially now that the book is done.

Ph.ca - What addi­tional pho­tog­ra­phy projects are on the horizon?

ba: another book of sub­jects I’ve worked with is being planned, but it may be another year before it’s ready.

Thanks to our part­ner­ship with The Cam­era Store (The largest cam­era store in Cal­gary Alberta Canada), I recently tested The Fuji X-T1 w/the Fuji XF 18-135mm f/3.5–5.6 lens. The Fuji X-T1 is a solid, retro-looking mir­ror­less cam­era that I’ve been want­ing to test for a few months as it has been get­ting seri­ously good reviews and some pros have even touted it as a DSLR killer. Although I love my DSLR (Nikon D800E replaced by the D810), it’s heavy and a pain to carry around for hours and hours at a time. I’m always inter­ested to test smaller cam­eras that can give my DSLR a good fight for its money in the hopes that one day I can just bury the DSLR beast.

Fuji X-T1

For those that want the con­clu­sion at the begin­ning, I really liked the Fuji– XT1 and I’ll talk about why in a few para­graphs, but let’s get that DSLR killer thing out of the way.

Straight off the bat this is one of the best mir­ror­less or point and shoot dig­i­tal cam­eras I have tested. It goes head to head to with my DSLR on many lev­els. That said, it can­not kill my DSLR or even lower priced DSLRs built in the past cou­ple of years because it can’t track and cap­ture mov­ing sub­jects with the same ease. I’m NOT a sports pho­tog­ra­pher but I reg­u­larly want to shoot a bird, squir­rel, fast mov­ing dog, or run­ning baby. For me, a DSLR killer must be able to track and cap­ture a mov­ing sub­ject with the same ease and effi­cacy (and ratio of keep­ers) as a DSLR. The X-T1 can­not eas­ily do this and admits to being unable to do this on page 68 of the man­ual. It’s the one big thing that’s miss­ing for me in this (and every other mir­ror­less or point and shoot on the mar­ket today) cam­era. It does a bet­ter job at this task than all the other mir­ror­less or point and shoot cam­eras I’ve tried, but DSLRs cost­ing the same or less money as this cam­era will get you sharper results with greater ease. If you accept this lim­i­ta­tion and you have the bud­get for it ($2100. for the cam­era and lens) it’s the best non-DSLR cam­era that I’ve tried.

Here’s a check­list of the main things I really liked about the Fuji X-T1

1 — Solid feel and size — The Fuji X-T1 is a solid feel­ing metal cam­era and I like that. I’m sick of pla­s­ticky feel­ing devices. This cam­era is VERY rem­i­nis­cent of my old Nikon FM2 film cam­era in terms of shape, size and weight. One of the main advan­tages of this cam­era is that it is much smaller and weighs less than most DSLRs. The FUJI X-T1 weighs 440 grams with the cam­era and card. My D800E with bat­tery and card weighs more than dou­ble (994 grams)!

2 — Over­all sharp­ness — Aside from sharp­ness on fast mov­ing sub­jects, you will love the sharp­ness of this camera!

The XT-1 gives you lovely nat­ural colours. Images are sharp straight out of the cam­era. Exif — ISO 400, f/5.6, 1/100. Note: I did NOT try to get the birds sharp in this image, I was fram­ing the peo­ple on the bench and the mov­ing birds were a happy coincidence.

3 — Auto­matic elec­tronic viewfinder - You can frame your scene by look­ing at the back of the LCD screen or through the viewfinder. The cam­era ‘knows’ when you bring the viewfinder to your eye and all inte­rior con­trols become instantly vis­i­ble — It’s very cool.

4 — Hori­zon line — This appears auto­mat­i­cally in order to let you know if your cam­era is par­al­lel to the sub­ject for dis­tor­tion free images. I really like this but you can shut it off if you don’t.

5 — Shoots in RAW for­mat, Jpeg and RAW/Jpeg

6 — Although I already ragged on the aut­o­fo­cus being infe­rior for mov­ing sub­jects when com­pared to a DSLR, it does a bet­ter job than all other non-DSLR cam­era that I’ve tried. In addi­tion it has focus points that you can move around your screen fairly eas­ily to allow the aut­o­fo­cus to focus where you want. I use these focus points all the time when I’m fram­ing a scene.

In order to assure sharp eyes (or sharp any­thing) I am always mov­ing the auto-focusing square to exactly where I want the most sharp­ness to be. In this case, I moved it right over my boy Baci’s eye. The Fuji X-T1 does a decent job at this! (Not as fluid as most DSRs mind you, but MUCH bet­ter than most mirrorless/point and shoot cam­eras I’ve tried).As an aside, this was a rel­a­tively low light shot with EXIF data at ISO 6400, f/4.7 at 1/80.

7 - Low light shoot­ing. This cam­era does a killer-good job in low light! It’s a low light maven! This image below was shot/pushed at ISO 12800. I never shoot at this ISO because nor­mally you get tons of noise (pixelization/grain) at this speed. But look how accept­able this image is! I have even included a 100% crop of a por­tion of the image with shadow detail as noise is most vis­i­ble in the shad­ows. Yes there is noise in those shad­ows but it’s accept­able noise, it’s not a hail­storm. Most mirrorless/point and shoot cam­eras (and most DSLRs) on the mar­ket today are infe­rior to the Fuji X-T1 with regard to their low-light and low-noise performance.

This image was shot at f/3.5 at 1/110 at ISO 12800! Look how accept­able the noise level is.

Here’s a 100% crop from the same image.

Noise is its nas­ti­est in the shad­ows but look at how well the noise is han­dled at ISO 12800 — Very, very impressive!

X-T1 Gripes

As hinted at pre­vi­ously, my main gripe with the X-T1 (and every other point and shoot/mirrorless cam­era that I’ve tried) is that it can­not aut­o­fo­cus fast enough to cap­ture fast mov­ing objects as sharp as I like them. Here is a shot of a squir­rel. I admit it’s very good for cam­eras in its class but my DSLR and most oth­ers I’ve tried does better.

A 100% crop detail of a squir­rel. I focused on the eye for about 15 images and the eye in this image is good but it is not tack sharp. My DSLR has a much bet­ter ratio of keep­ers for dif­fi­cult shots like these. EXIF data was ISO 800, f/5.6 @ 1/850

The main other gripe would be the price as $2100. for a mir­ror­less cam­era and lens is quite a chunk of change when DSLRs with lenses can be had for many hun­dreds of dol­lars less. That said, we should be used to pay­ing more for devices that are phys­i­cally smaller; it’s the trend across so many con­sumer prod­ucts. To tem­per the price blow a bit, this cam­era is very ver­sa­tile and can accom­mo­date many dif­fer­ent lenses of vary­ing focal lengths. It’s solidly built and it seems like it will last.

In con­clu­sion, if you have the bud­get for this cam­era you will love its size, shape, feel and its weight. The qual­ity and sharp­ness of the files are superb and as long as you don’t expect tack sharp eyes from mov­ing sub­jects, you will love this cam­era. To date, it’s the best non DSLR cam­era I’ve tried.

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #132 fea­tures an inter­view with Cana­dian pho­tog­ra­pher Bryan Davies. Dur­ing the inter­view we dis­cuss Bryan’s rust pho­tog­ra­phy. We cover what inspired the series, how it was shot, how it was post-processed and Bryan’s plans for the future.

Thanks to The Cam­era Store (The largest cam­era store in Cal­gary, Alberta, Canada) for spon­sor­ing the Photography.ca podcast.

Click the player at the end of this post to lis­ten to (or down­load) the 13ish minute podcast.

Although ALL com­ments are appre­ci­ated, com­ment­ing directly in this blog is pre­ferred. Many thanks to Teddy Naimus for his com­ment from the last pod­cast. Thanks as well for the emails and wel­come to all the new mem­bers of the bul­letin board.

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #131 reviews a Lens­baby lens. Lens­baby lenses are spe­cial in that they have a sweet spot of sharp focus in the cen­ter of the lens and blur out toward the edges. In addi­tion to this (and where the magic truly lives), you can actu­ally bend the lens to move that sweet spot of focus around the frame. The par­tic­u­lar lens I tested was a 50mm Lens­baby Com­poser with dou­ble glass optic. It’s great fun and fairly easy to use though you need to know in advance that it’s a man­ual lens. It will still help you fig­ure out expo­sure based on your ISO and aper­ture ring you select, but you’ll be going old school and man­u­ally focus­ing this bad-boy. It’s worth it though as you can make some really cre­ative in-camera images with this lens. It’s a fab­u­lous lens to juice up your creativity.

Thanks to The Cam­era Store (The largest cam­era store in Cal­gary, Alberta, Canada) for spon­sor­ing the Photography.ca pod­cast and for allow­ing me to test this lens.

Click the player at the end of this post to lis­ten to (or down­load) the 11ish minute podcast.

This is an image of the Jacques-Cartier Bridge in Mon­treal, Que­bec. It was very easy to see and cap­ture this effect in camera.

An image of the Jacques-Cartier Bridge in Mon­treal, Que­bec. Because the bridge was not cen­tered in the lens, I had to phys­i­cally move the sharp sweet spot of focus by actu­ally bend­ing the lens and thus the image took longer to compose.

Although ALL com­ments are appre­ci­ated, com­ment­ing directly in this blog is pre­ferred. Many thanks to Bare­foot, Troy Borque and Terry Babij for their com­ments from the last pod­cast. Thanks as well for the emails and wel­come to all the new mem­bers of the bul­letin board.

André Kertész (1894–1985) is another pho­tog­ra­pher whose work you should (re)discover in this blog post series on pho­tog­ra­phers you need to check out. Kertész was born in Budapest, Hun­gary and started mak­ing pho­tographs as a teenager. In 1925, while in his early thir­ties, he moved to Paris France where he worked as a free­lance photographer/photojournalist for him­self and for photo mag­a­zines. He gained noto­ri­ety for his fresh style and inter­est­ing com­po­si­tions, was pub­lished in mul­ti­ple mag­a­zines and self pub­lished mul­ti­ple books of his pho­tog­ra­phy. In addi­tion, he had sev­eral exhi­bi­tions of his work.

About a decade later he moved to the USA where he spent the rest of his work­ing life work­ing as a pho­tog­ra­pher. He was on exclu­sive con­tract with Condé Nast mag­a­zine for many years and he always devoted time to his per­sonal work and projects. In his later years he spent a lot of time exper­i­ment­ing with Polaroid pho­tog­ra­phy.

I’ve always admired Kertész’s work because of his atten­tion to the ele­ments that make up a good pho­to­graph. For Kertész, the story of a pho­to­graph is crafted from every­day peo­ple and objects but he man­aged to make what­ever he pho­tographed stand out. He used light, angles, com­po­si­tions, jux­ta­po­si­tions as well exper­i­ment­ing with alter­na­tive pho­to­graphic tech­niques to cre­ate inter­est­ing moods and tell inter­est­ing visual stories.

Pho­tog­ra­phy pod­cast #130 reviews the Big Stop­per by Lee fil­ters. The big stop­per is a 10 stop glass fil­ter that slows down shut­ter speeds in order to accen­tu­ate move­ment. Both clouds and water are clas­sic sub­jects for use with this fil­ter and the result­ing pho­tographs tend to be ethe­real and dreamy. Aside from review­ing the fil­ter, I offer up 6 tips on how to use it effectively.

Thanks to The Cam­era Store (The largest cam­era store in Cal­gary, Alberta, Canada) for spon­sor­ing the Photography.ca podcast.

Click the player at the end of this post to lis­ten to (or down­load) the 18ish minute podcast.

This evening image of Rue Lau­rier in Mon­treal is a long expo­sure image using the big stop­per. You can see move­ment in the clouds, and in the cars. The peo­ple look ‘ghost­like’ because they moved (some­what) in place while wait­ing for the traf­fic light. Notice the traf­fic light has all 3 colours lit because the traf­fic light cycled dur­ing this 30 sec­ond expo­sure. Exif data — ISO 100, f/11, 30 sec­ond shut­ter speed.

Fast mov­ing water at Chutes Dor­win in Raw­don, QC. Canada. In the top image I used my low­est ISO (50) with my small­est aper­ture (f/32) and this yielded a shut­ter speed of .4 sec­onds. The water does look dreamy. But when I used the big stop­per, I was able to get much slower shut­ter speeds and the lower image was exposed for 15 sec­onds. It’s much dreamier and more ethe­real look­ing but the fil­ter must be used with care. If you look at the top of the bot­tom image you can see a rain­bow­ish arc and this where flare entered my cam­era. As dis­cussed in the pod­cast, this is eas­ily solved with a hat (or postprocessing).

Foun­tain at Parc Lafontaine in Mon­treal, QC., Canada — The slow­est shut­ter speed I could get with­out a fil­ter was 1/60 in this light. When I put the big stop­per on, It extends the avail­able shut­ter speeds big time. The image on the right was a 15 sec­ond expo­sure using the big stop­per and look how dreamy the water looks.

Every month on our pho­tog­ra­phy forum mem­bers nom­i­nate images that they like. Then at the end of the month I choose an excel­lent image and talk about why it rocks. The photo I choose is not nec­es­sar­ily the best one of the month. I’ve come to real­ize it’s not really log­i­cal to pit images from totally dif­fer­ent gen­res against each other. That’s why there are cat­e­gories in photo con­tests. I just choose a photo that has extremely strong ele­ments that we can learn from.

1. Composition/Framing — This sun­set image has many strong com­po­si­tional ele­ments going for it. The lay­ing of the fore­ground trees, midground hills and back­ground clouds/sky and sun works really well for me. My eye really enjoys the lines and curves in the moun­tains and hills. There are also no major dis­trac­tions on the edges in this scene for me. My eye goes straight to the sun, then straight below it to the midground sun patch, and then it explores the rest of the pho­to­graph with delight.

2 . Exposure/lighting — The light is just plain lovely here due to the par­tial cloud cover. That said, shoot­ing into the sun is often chal­leng­ing and often yields under­ex­po­sure. Cor­rect­ing it often leaves lots of shadow noise but this image looks clean and the tones in the fore­ground and midground have lovely shadow detail.

3. Colour and post pro­cess­ing — The colours are warm and bright in the sky but not too over­done. Sharp­ness works well for me and looks very natural.

For all these rea­sons, this is my choice for image of the month. Since we all have opin­ions, some mem­bers may dis­agree with my choice. That’s cool but THIS thread is not the place for debate over my pick, NOR is it the place to fur­ther cri­tique the image. The pur­pose here is to sug­gest strong ele­ments in the photo that we may learn from.

I’m start­ing a new cat­e­gory in this blog for pho­tog­ra­phers that I think are worth check­ing out. I’ll start off with pho­tog­ra­phers that have been around awhile and I’ll write a few para­graphs, show a few pics and offer addi­tional links to whet your pho­to­graphic appetites. Let’s start off with Nan Goldin.

Nan Goldin is a con­tem­po­rary Amer­i­can pho­tog­ra­pher born in 1953 cur­rently liv­ing in NYC, USA and I’ve been fol­low­ing her work for a over 2 decades. If I were forced to describe her work I’d write that Goldin is a ‘moment-photojournalist’. She both cap­tures and cre­ates inti­mate moments of the peo­ple in her life and it’s hard not to have an opin­ion about her pho­tog­ra­phy. If you have never heard of her, research her two most famous photo books (The Bal­lad of Sex­ual Depen­dency, Aper­ture, 1986 and The Devil’s Play­ground Phaidon 2003) in order to form your own impres­sions. One thing you will notice pretty quickly is that a lot of the work breaks the rules. A lot of images are out of focus. A lot of the images are not safe for work.

What I really like about Goldin’s work are the moods she cre­ates in her images. She real­ized early on that like life itself, ’ life’s moments’ as cap­tured through the lens don’t always need to be sharp to be pow­er­ful. The moments of life that Goldin cap­tures, like life itself are often imperfect.